The Mobile Collective

Gold Mobile Innovation (GMI) Ltd is a small innovation consultancy with deep experience in the mobile and digital industries. Founded in 2007, GMI has been increasingly specialising in Open Innovation, Open R&D, and collaborative product & service development models, leading to the creation of The Mobile Collective (TMC) in 2010. TMC enables and supports the collaborative development of innovative technology-based solutions by bringing the mobile developer & designer communities together with professional scientists and educators in ThinkCamp events.

ThinkCamps provide an open and creative environment for developing new products and services. They are designed to support a collaborative approach to generating cross-industry solutions. The events select one area of focus (such as Science Education) and are structured to address problems, rise to challenges, and take advantage of new opportunities. Participants are drawn from a diverse range of disciplines and skill-sets, which they apply in a creative way. The TMC team facilitates the generation of ideas during the ThinkCamp events and then provides support for the organically formed working groups to further develop and implement the solutions, both during and beyond the event.

The first area of focus has been in applying mobile technologies to healthcare challenges. The mHealth ThinkCamp that was held in June 2011 brought together 75 mobile industry and medical industry members, created 10 workshop groups during the event, and saw 7 pitched solutions at the end of the day. Of these, 2 proposals continue to be worked on by a highly engaged group of participants. Further ThinkCamps are currently being planned for the application of mobile technologies to Science, Cloud Computing & Music (from the view point of the artist).

The role of The Mobile Collective in the Citizen Cyberscience project will be to develop requirements with respect to learning and community building and building community engagement. TMC will furthermore support Dissemination and Exploitation Planning by performing Community Outreach.

Margaret Gold is the Co-Founder and Director of The Mobile Collective. She gained a Masters degree in Business Administration from the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, and has over 10 years product development, business growth, corporate venture & start-up experience.

Margaret has worked with Imperial College to launch the Mobile Applications Centre, bringing together talent, expertise and engagement from across the College to work with partners in academia and industry in developing pioneering mobile applications. Before that she worked with Vodafone to design, launch and grow the Betavine mobile developer community (which reached a global audience of over 3,000 members and supported the development of over 600 beta-applications).

Before launching her own consultancy business, Margaret was a senior consultant at Edengene, a boutique innovation consultancy where she worked with FTSE 100 companies such as Boots and E.ON (and organisations such as the Carbon Trust) to develop and launch new products and services to market. The idea-generation & facilitation methodologies, and proposition development tools from this period of work have directly shaped the underlying Mobile Collective methodology and ultimately led to the development of the ThinkCamp series.

Margaret is also one of the Founders and Organisers of Over the Air, the largest and most successful developer event in the Mobile Industry. Now in its fifth year, Over the Air attracts over 600 attendees and the active support of major players in the mobile industry. A key feature of every Over the Air is the hackday competition, which attracts over 20 entries each year – many of which win valuable prizes across a wide range of general categories, sponsored categories, and thematic or problem-solving challenges. At the record breaking 2011 event held in Bletchley Park, more than 120 attendees stayed coding overnight.

Brian Fuchs Brian is Co-Founder and CTO of The Mobile Collective, and has developed computing support for research in the US, UK, and Germany for many years. At the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (1999-2006) and the Hans Nixdorf Center for Information Management (2006), he contributed to the design and implementation of services and applications for a variety of e-Science projects (ECHO, VLMA, eSciDoc).

He was most recently Co-ordinator of the Social Computing Group in the Dept. of Computing at Imperial College. At Imperial College, he was active as a developer and researcher in several projects that aim to provide support for research (PhiloGrid, Patterns of Reference, DVE) as well as projects with a strong mobile component (TfL Mobile Demonstrator, Totalcare, Direct Assessment of Digital Music Distribution).

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